Hey there! As an engineer, here's something that's been bugging me for a while: why (and when) did the US publish updated dietary guidelines—avoiding fats and pushing carbs—and do those dates correspond to increases in obesity and diabetes? In my mind, they were linked. So I asked my research assistant, Claude, to go pull the data and see if he could find a correlation. Note: correlation doesn't automatically mean causation. Here's what Claude found: The three pivot points 1956 — The "Basic...
14 days ago • 4 min read
Hey there! I am not a world-class dog trainer. I'm a curious lifelong learner, a problem-solver, and an engineer. And like everyone else, I don't always practice what I preach. I forget sometimes. So while I've been writing this book—dredging up memories and strategies I'd half-forgotten—I started trying to apply them to a very real, very current challenge: getting Mooney to hold his sit for examination. I went back to visualization first, because that's what Jane Savoie taught in her...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Hey there! Butterflies don't do anything just because you ask them to. They don't want to please you. They don't care about your classical music, your garden, or your ten thousand tiny wings all needing to move in perfect unison. So when a trainer named Ken Ramirez was asked to teach 10,000 butterflies to fly on cue, in a London garden, in under two weeks — the real question wasn't "what signal do I use?" It was: "what's actually in it for the butterfly?" His answer was food. Bowls of fruit,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey there! For years, I tried to teach my golden retrievers the Box Trick. The goal: get the dog to place all four paws inside a progressively smaller box. I could get them into a big box easily enough. But smaller boxes? Impossible. I'd basically given up. Then I confessed my problem to Susan Garrett — the internationally acclaimed dog trainer whose workshops transformed how I understood learning. She looked at me and asked: "Have you ever seen a dog taking a poo?" I burst out laughing. And...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hey there! Did you know that your subconscious brain doesn't understand "Don't"? Here's a strange little fact about your brain: it can't process a negative image. Try it. Don't think about a pink elephant. Too late. You just saw one. I've been writing about visualization for my upcoming book, Choose, Fail, Grow, and this quirk of the brain keeps showing up everywhere I look — in tennis, in swim meets, in dog training, in just about anything where performance matters. Here's the science in a...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey there! The Top 3 Lessons I (Re-)Learned from My Great-Nephews I love STEM, art, and summer projects. And I love spending time with my great-nephews — ages 8, 10, and 12 are genuinely magical. (The eldest at 14 is too cool to associate with the rest of us.) Last week I told you about the cardboard boat — built same-day before raft night, surfed by Dutch and Finn at the pool. This week: the rest of the experiment lineup, and three lessons I thought I already knew. Slime — The Unexpected...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hey there! In 2014, our fourth-quarter budget cuts meant the GE Aviation holiday party got pushed to February. We needed a team-building activity. I found a "Build-A-Boat" event, but it cost thousands of dollars. So I did what any self-respecting engineer would do. I built my own version. Cardboard from the office move. Duct tape. Plastic tablecloths. Four lanes in the GE Fitness Center pool. Four hours on a Friday afternoon. The Float-A-Boat Regatta was born. I had a hypothesis: instead of...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hey there! If you've been following along, you know Mooney and I have been working on solving the CRV puzzle — how do you turn a Honda CRV into a comfortable, safe, functional travel setup for a large golden retriever? Well — we figured it out. At least for now. Here's what the finished solution looks like: Mooney gets the entire back seat area — bridged all the way across to the front seats with a custom-built platform. The key elements came together like this: Two custom storage containers...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hey there! His name was Tizer — and he nearly destroyed our marriage. Not literally. But in 1987, when Stephen and I brought home our first golden retriever, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We tried confining him to the downstairs family room with a baby gate. He jumped it and chewed the vertical blinds. Every day we tried to move things out of his way. Every day he found something new. Then one day I came home to find my tube watercolors chewed up, paint smeared all over a...
4 months ago • 1 min read